Notes on Movies Continued

As I am months behind in this, I am going to have to do a few of these. The good news is that I have not seen too many movies either, so three (posts) might do the trick. Of course at my rate that could take another two months.



Anna Karenina (2012)

I admit I liked what they did with this. They got Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay, and his vision was to take episodes from the book and put them in a theater setting, but the theater is usually just a starting off point for a good deal of clever filmwork. I remarked at the time that the movie makes a lot of assumptions that viewers have read the book and have a good recollection of it. Many minor characters for example make appearances without any introduction or explanation of who they are, you have to recognize them from the novel, and a similar dynamic is applied to various of the situations that the major characters are involved in, they appear or are alluded to in the course of the movie without being any further developed. As in often the case with modern productions that have some money to work with, the colors and sets and clothes and most of the people are lustrously beautiful. I was not enamored some of the casting, in particular Keira Knightley as Anna, though she does seem to fit with many people's idea of what Anna is. Older men (by which I mean older men than me) in the business love her, she is an ideal art-world sex goddess for them. Personally I don't detect much of a soul there, or an appealing mind either, though reputedly she is very smart. Maybe I don't like her, or Anna, because they are too superior to me all around, or at least there is no opening for me to approach them in a way that is pleasing to me. Even in the book there is with Anna much of a sense that her mental and emotional life, more as the result of cultured habit and upbringing than intellectual development, are inaccessible, certainly to the lowlier sort of reader.

I didn't like the actor they had playing Levin either, who played him as more of a goober than I think was merited. I thought it was widely known, or understood, that Levin was modeled in large part after Tolstoy himself, and in the book he had some cachet in Moscow society even if he was regarded as a bit of an oddball.
I do remember thinking that Vronsky was well-cast.




The King's Speech (2010)


I had seen this a few years back and I gave it another try. It still strikes me as a weak Oscar best picture winner. The material is too slight, the class dynamic strikes my American sensibility as rather gross, not that we do not have problems of our own in this regard; some of the particular forms of the British system are still alien enough to strike me as strange. The uninspiring George VI is not one of my favorite British royals. I was always partial to his disgraced brother, mostly on account of his clothes. I suppose the film had some appeal for me as a period piece, given my general affection for this period, though even in this I thought the effect was overly drab. Not in the physical sense--I like drab as an aesthetic in that--but in its animating forces.

It appears from reading this that I think it is dreadful and was rolling my eyes and generally not enjoying myself throughout the movie, but I am not fierce enough to denounce anything that thoroughly. Some of the performances are quite good. Still, overall I found it a disappointment.

The Hurt Locker (2009)


The second of the back to back Oscar winners from the turn of the current decade, and I suppose the best-known movie to deal with George Bush II's Iraq War. What I remember most about it was that it was filmed in videotape, and its overwhelming aura of alienation and nihilism. Compared with World War II movies or even to some extent Vietnam movies it is striking to me how little emphasis is placed on the connection of the soldiers with the greater society back home, effectively there is not much of one, and this is of course one of the themes of the movie. While I am partial to some landscapes more than others, I usually am able to feel some sense of beauty in most places. Iraq in this movie at least looks to be oppressively unlovable and alien in a geographic sense. The barracks--trailers I guess--where the soldiers reside are equally devoid of any tribute to aesthetics or positive cultural associations. We are reminded that there are still men in the world--I don't remember there being any women soldiers in this movie, which was somewhat famously directed by a woman--who take to the life of soldiering and war as their calling, though perhaps there are not as many being produced in the Western nations as there used to be, for good or ill, I am not clear in my own mind on this point. The Iraq War is presented in this movie as a somewhat endless series of military exercises and maneuvers, which, however skillfully executed, do not seem to be leading towards any obvious end, at least from the American point of view. Perhaps I should see it again sometime. It is not an enjoyable or hopeful movie in any way however.

 
Top Gun (1986)


Another military-themed movie, of a sort, though immersed in late Cold War Reagan-era jingoism rather than the fractured confusion that in the public mind at least has characterized the more recent conflicts. What a difference 30 years makes! I was not looking forward to seeing this, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, not because of anything to do with the story, but because I found it (as I have on several of the rare occasions when I take up movies from these particular years) so much fun to be back again in the oddly lost world of the mid-1980s, which were my high school years and the details of which therefore I recollect very vividly and which belong to me--not that I was myself doing anything very exciting compared to most people at the time--much more than the present does. There is a lack of oppressiveness in the atmosphere of this movie compared to pretty much everything about life in the present that does ring true in my memory. The look and demeanor of the women in the 80s were so comparatively pleasing too. Of course it is easy to be gulled by movie stars, but with the NCAA basketball tournament being on this week I was looking on the internet at some of the old games of the 80s and when the cameras scans the crowd or shows the cheerleaders they look a lot happier and like they are having a lot more fun, and are therefore cuter, than what I feel when I look at similarly aged people today, though perhaps I am partial to my own time. And then of course the lively, beautiful young women of the 80s are the 40 and 50-somethings who seem to be not especially happy with circumstances in the present.

And Quiet Flows the Don (1957)

3 part, 6 hour Soviet adaptation of the Sholakhov novel about Cossacks during the period of World War I and the Revolution. I found it to be very poignant. Why would this be, given all of the horrible things that not only take place in this story, but that we know are going to happen in the future to anyone who is surviving at the end as well? To begin with I am emotionally susceptible to the historical events of the period under consideration more than most others. I am as well susceptible to certain of the particular sensations which cinematic evolution had become adept at projecting by the 1950s, so much so that much that the default or base of most my ideas about geography and how the natural world especially is supposed to look like date from this time. I had also read the book, and the story is moving and stirring, in the sense of having sweep and movement. Even though they were a wicked regime and our enemies and they stifled entrepreneurship the circumstance that it seems to have been a prestige project in the Soviet Union may have made some impression on me also, the idea of the existence of this whole other film industry completely cut off from Hollywood certainly, but even Western Europe, full of actors and directors most people in the West know nothing, who if they ever had occasion to speak English, did not do so professionally. The movie was shot in bright and unsubtle color that makes it appear somewhat cartoonish at first but I found it grew on me.

I have written in the past about my time in Prague in the 90s and how I found certain lingering aspects of the lifestyle and organization of the era appealing, namely in the form of (certain of) the kinds of shared experiences that people had with one another, which seemed to me superior to the weak shared experiences, if there are any at all, that I at least have with anyone in the United States. This called some of that to mind too.


This came with a 4th disc exclusively devoted to some of the oddest special features I've ever seen. There was a droning interview with a modern day Cossack ataman (something like a chief), who was a balding, heavyset, rather unwarlike middle aged man wearing a medal-covered blue dress uniform and sitting behind a desk in what looked like an office in a community center. There was about a twenty minute segment devoted to traditional Cossack songs and dances which I was going to take a quick glimpse at and move on, but I found I was drawn into and rather uplifted by it, because, at least during the performance, the people were so proud and comfortable in their own skin not merely as awesome or superior individuals but as members of a community with some sense of positive identity and purpose. I know this sort of thing is discouraged nowadays among us because it often ends in conflict and people getting killed, but it is very attractive when you see it. The anomic life spent in shuffling about with one's head down, unable to drawn strength from or commune with such vitality as does exist around you is pitiful in comparison. This was what I was thinking while watching the dances anyway.

Movies 1985-1998

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I really do not like much from the 90s, movies or anything else, which is a little sad, since that was the decade I was in my twenties, and one would think I would enjoy being reminded of that era. But I find that I do not at all. With regard to the art and entertainment of the time in themselves, my charitable interpretation of this is that they are currently passing through that awkward age where their charms, assuming that they have any, are hard to discern, and their themes and guiding assumptions feel tired and unappealing, because the psychic universe they inhabit is still much the same as that which prevails now, only with an incomplete awareness of everything that has happened in the interval, which has the tendency to give them a rather grotesque character. This is similar to how I felt about the entertainments of the 1960s and 70s when I was younger, and what I presume is how people in those times felt about the ones of the 1940s and 1950s. In these latter cases enough time has passed now that the environments and social atmosphere we see in them seem quite unlike that in which we currently live, and in some instances the differences--including many that we either took for granted or considered to be unfortunate if we happened to be sentient at the time--have become attractive with the passage of years, at least to some people. If I have enough energy, I may elaborate on this more later on.

Pi (1998)

Maybe it seemed good at the time, but now it comes across as a compendium of the worst tendencies of Generation X alienation, ennui, and incapablility of engaging with anyone at all who does not perfectly suit one's imagined social requirements dedicated to celluloid. It is a low budget indie shot in dreary black and white about a guy who has presumably a very high IQ but, unfortunately for the interest of the film, has little in the way of accomplishments, palpable genius, or even social acquaintance. He is obsessed with number patterns, though certainly nothing beyond what the internet has revealed lots of people to have, has a pill addiction, rarely leaves the house, has no real friends and grows ever more incapable of interacting with people or even being sentient as the film goes on. It did recall to me the time when most smart people built their own computers (maybe they still do, but I haven't met anyone who does this in years) and when New York City was the domain, both in reality and in the popular imagination, of a large population of eccentric obsessives and introverts who lived in apartments lined with bookshelves and were economically neither exceptionally busy nor productive. I suppose there are probably a few such people hanging on in today's New York. though they would seem to be increasingly marginalized, and it would not appear that they are setting any kind of dominant tone in the current life of the city.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

This has always had a high reputation, but I didn't care for it. It gave me no joy. The dialogue is 97% macho posturing and insults and defiance directed at other people. I think it is considered to be funny, but most of the humor was lost on me. This movie had an over-the-top aspect about it in the writing, acting, plot, etc, that makes me think it is a commentary on the Industry of some kind, which is the cause of its being so celebrated. I don't like most of the actors in this either. Chazz Palmintieri especially is like the anti-Claude Rains. I see his name listed in the cast and my heart sinks. Gabriel Byrne isn't much better.

Braveheart (1995)

I had never seen it. It at least has some entertainment value, though it could have been a little shorter. Mel Gibson is a polarizing figure now I suppose but I don't react to him strongly one way or the other. Clearly he has a violence fetish and he is more openly assertive in expressing contempt for weak and timid men who shy away from combat and struggle than most people are. This helps him as a director and actor in that it gives everything he does a decided character, but it is ultimately not one that moves me to any kind of especial response. One is reminded that people really love medieval fighting. The depiction of the blatantly homosexual Prince Edward, later Edward II, is mildly hilarious, but is probably too over the top to be acceptable to people nowadays.  

The Fugitive (1993)

Thriller starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, well-received at the time. For a 21-year old movie where people still use pay phones all the time its atmosphere, particularly when in professional and corporate environments, is very recognizable to anyone living in the present. I know that you are supposed to suspend belief and the necessity for strict realism when you watch this kind of a movie, and let yourself be carried along by the narrative, but this one asks a little too much of that, particularly since there isn't really anything else going on in it. I had a thought come to me about this movie about 3 days ago, when I was not a liberty or had materials to record it, that encapsulated better my impression of it, but I cannot remember any of it now.

This is set in Chicago, a city that has always held comparatively little appeal to me, and I suspect to most people from the east coast as a rule. I know a number of people who lived there for a time, mostly for graduate school, and I don't recall that any of them loved it, and several seemed to have loathed it more than I probably would have found necessary. But it is true that it has never struck me, in movies or in person (apart from Wrigley Field), as an attractive place, especially in winter. The weather is just as dreary as it is here probably, but we at least have trees and hills, and winding roads, and the light seems to be a little warmer. I would probably not dislike it that much if I had had a reason to spend some time there. I would like all the bars and the central and eastern European food, which latter especially is thin on the ground in New England.

Apropos of nothing, the 1960s television show which inspired this movie was apparently a favorite of my grandmother's. I have never seen it.

Mask (1985)

Now we are further back in time, to an era that does feel different to me from the present, and of which I do feel a certain fondness, though the period of which I am particularly fond was quite short. The peak, or 'real' 80s for me, were essentially two years, '84 and '85. '86 still had some of the qualities of these previous years but you could sense it was a year of transition. '87 and to a lesser extent '88 were disappointing. '89 to '91 I thought promising, as if building up to a world in which I might comfortably and meaningfully move, but it was really the swan song of a dying order. In '92 and '93 the new cultural environment, in which we still largely find ourselves, really began to insinuate itself, '94 and '95 were kind of dog years in which some of the lingering detritus from the previous age had to receive its final crushing (I remember these being the years when the restrictions on smoking really begin to be amped up, for example). '96 and '97 weren't bad. I essentially lost contact with the world after '97 and cannot tell one year from another since then. My feelings about these years by the way do not always correlate with what was happening in my own life, but with what I felt the possibilities in the greater society were if one could be a part of whatever was happening. I personally personally had better years socially in the early 90s than in 1985, but my sense was always that the opportunities I could have had if I had been cool 1985 or 1989 were better than those I could have had if I had been cool in 1993 or '94.

From a distance of 29 years, Mask has a good deal of this to me positive 1985ish vibe. Of course at the time (I was 15) I would not have found it so. Indeed, I remember when this came out and the way it was promoted it seemed about the most hideous thing possible, a tear-jerker about a deformed freak starring Cher, who seemed to me at this juncture the embodiment of everything gross about the 60s (and my dominant impression of the "60s" then, notwithstanding a thousand other things I surely knew about it, was that it was at its core an orgy of grossness, Woodstock, LSD, extremely hairy people on sexual rampages, and so on). If I had seen it in 1985, my response to it would have been morally reprehensible as well, something along the lines of, 'OK, so this guy had to live with a horrible and painful facial disfigurement and died when he was sixteen, but you know what, he still got more action in his life than it looks like I am going to get. I also would have begun to fantasize about getting a job a counselor at camp for blind people, which is where the character in this movie was able to meet his girlfriend, though, as wife my helpfully points out, my looks really are not my problem so much as my personality, which would have sabotaged all my efforts at picking up one of the blind girls.*

When this turned up on my list something of this ancient repulsion almost immediately started to rise up in me, though I was willing to give it a chance based on my warm feelings for its year. I also noticed that it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, several of whose 1970s movies I had thought were good, and this piqued my interest a little as well. There were a number of directors who made well-regarded movies in the early part of that decade (William Freidken; Francis Ford Coppola) and then went off the rails somewhat as it went on, but continued to work fairly steadily through the 80s and 90s, though their later work is not much celebrated. I like Bogdanovich's sensibility, and it informs this movie too, which on paper has a lot of things about it that I would otherwise be pre-disposed not to like.

The movie, or I should said the re-issued director's cut that I saw, has an excellent classic rock soundtrack that accurately captures the way that kind of music existed in the general atmosphere in those days, especially the Bruce Springsteen songs, which had to be cut from the original release of the movie due to a dispute with the record company over royalties, which dispute has evidently been cleared up now. You can also see in this, which even by the early 90s was beginning to change, how comparatively smaller the difference in socio-economic classes were compared to now. The film is set among a community of bikers, and they are different, and a subculture and all of that, but Bogdanovich and the actors do not seem to be daunted by the challenge of portraying or trying to make sense of this lifestyle, nor do they project a consciousness of it being something far beneath them that they are examining critically, nor do they need to pity the condition of their subjects and examine what ails them, because the community, while it has some problems with drug use and familial relationships, is not desolate and distressed in the way that such communities are often depicted as being now.

Cher did a good job acting in this, and supposedly she was considered in her youth by connoisseurs of the female form to have one of the most spectacular bodies of all time, but I still find her to be rather slaggy. The prejudices of youth die hard.

My recent late night time wasting has been watching old epsiodes of the very long-running 1960s TV show My Three Sons on Youtube. The shows in themselves are not particularly interesting, plotwise, though it is certainly enjoyable to imagine a world where a typical 'problem' is having made dates with two 1960s California babes for the same night. I like to study Fred MacMurray to learn how to be a dad. None of the children on this show ever scream at each other, or backtalk, or complain about boredom, or complain about work, or are on the autism spectrum, the dishes and laundry and vacuuming are always done. Fred MacMurray is an aeronautical engineer, and all of the other adults who appear in the show seem to be respectable professionals as well. It's all very calm. Of course I know the real world was nothing like this show even in the good old days; in my own family at this time, especially on the Irish side, severe alcoholism, chronic unemployment, domestic abuse, and problems of that ilk were more the order of the day than Steve Douglas, but for all that I do think to a certain extent MacMurray projects how the men and fathers of that day generally saw themselves, authoritative, necessary, competent, natural leaders in the community. The fathers of my generation, if they are of a squishy liberal background, are largely incapable of seeing themselves in this way. Those of a more right wing bent want to see and present themselves in this way and probably believe it is proper that they should, but even with them it is usually not convincing. It isn't deeply encripted in their world view the way it was with the older generation.

Another thing about this show I never realized is that even though for most of its run it was about an entirely male household, it was nonetheless a parade of really good-looking girls, the wholesome old California and Mormon types, mostly Robbie's dates or other love interests, but even the older teachers and social workers and so on who turned up were unusually attractive. My favorite episode so far is a blakc and white one from 1963 where in repsonse to various Russian threats Robbie's high school decided to award a letter jacket for excellence in science. The main competitors for this award are Robbie and a studious, bespectacled girl with blond hair whose father is a physican. When the jock types begin to mock Robbie about the science letter, he tries to lose on purpose. The smart blond girl does not like this. Wonder why? Her mom knows, and decides it's time for her to get down to the beauty parlor for a makeover. Robbie wins the award and Jimmy Stewart turns up (as himself) in his general's uniform to personally present it and give a rousing speech about the importance of young Americans to excel in school, and the sciences in particular, that everything we held dear depended on it (though I do not recall that the economy or the stock market or taxes were explicitly mentioned). Robbie and the blond girl end the show by going on a date to a highbrow musical concert. There are a lot of retro-stimulators that could be supposed to be appealing and reassuring to me packed into 23 minutes here. But I am not really taken in in practice.    

When the sons on this show (or two of them at least) get married, their (extremely lovely) wives move right into the house with the rest of the family and everyone gets along swimmingly and the house stays as clean and well-organized as ever. Even after one of the women gives birth to triplets!

I like Polly (Chip's wife). She was a cutie pie. She came in at the very tail end of the show, the last two years, from 1970-72 (It started in 1960).

*I forgot to note in the original posting the theme, still prevalent at that time in the Karate Kid and various other movies and TV shows, of the great California fantasy, wherein however hopeless of a loser one was at home in the East or Midwest, if he can make it to California he will inevitably find the beautiful, nice and happy girlfriend, in most instances blonde, of his dreams, whether his wildest or tamest ones I suppose depends on your personal preferences. I think everybody knew that this could not possibly be real, but myth was too alluring for most to avoiding succumbing to it. I haven't seen it depicted in a long time though, probably since the 80s, so maybe it has died out. 

Got To Keep Up With the Movie Posts

I have lots of great essays on general and pertinent topics coming.

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)

Disney movie, not really for little children so much as for the 10-14 range I would think, that one of my ratings guides (my favorite one, actually) really liked. I don't think they make this kind of movie much anymore. The modern child would doubtless find its pace and method of storytelling hopelessly old-fashioned and ponderous. Not my children perhaps, or at least some of them, but we seem to be well out of the main currents of contemporary life. I already feel my sons' pain when they will arrive at college and be surrounded by boys who have long had the text message booty call (or whatever its 2020s equivalent will be) down cold; because they probably won't. I didn't like the movie quite that much, though I'm not going to rip it either. It is set in the 30s, a time period which often works well in cinematic renderings, and is probably popular for that reason. Comparatively speaking, movies from the 20s are much rarer, and usually feel off besides; and the 1910s are essentially a decade forgotten by everyone at this point, in part because nobody has a good feel, or much interest, in how to make visually compelling movies about them. But filmmakers seem to have some sense of the aesthetic of the 30s, what they felt like visually if nothing else, that is more accurate than that which they have for other periods.

The star of the movie was the great Meredith Salenger, who is two months younger than I am. Who didn't want a piece of  like her back in the 80s? Nobody, I think. She only appeared in five films before retiring to go to Harvard and Pepperdine Law School, and I think I only saw part of one of them (though she appears to have returned to acting in recent years). Obviously, it was enough.

Reminder of What the 80s Could Have Been Like (if it had only been given to one to be a winner)

I have assumed in past posts (Vanessa Paradis, Jennifer Connelly) the privilege of being allowed to express my teen-aged thoughts about teen-aged girls who were teenagers at the same time I was. Is it not more wistful in that sense than perverse, to recall that lost but in retrospect beautiful summer of 1985, when Meredith and I were both 15, and I was walking up the Easton Road or across some parched empty ball field on a 93 degree day, and she was out there, in Hollywood hanging out with the Corey Feldmans of the world, our paths decidedly not doomed to cross...I have always liked the name Meredith, since about 1985 in fact, enough that usually the mere hint that one bearing that name might be in the vicinity has always had the effect of piquing my consciousness and arousing some heat to flow into the old joints in anticipation of pleasurable experience. The name calls to mind the girl one knew at summer camp (I never went to summer camp), standing on the dock, framed by the encompassing silhouette made by countless and endless pine trees, her wet shoulder length hair and field hockey player's taut calves and arms glistening in the half moon, and you soon to know to partake of the pleasure contained in this for the first time...For those of us who never got to be young in this way, there is a kind of therapy in pretending we once were.

I once knew a bartender named Meredith who was kind of a loudmouthed party girl, but I liked her personality. She had a slight belly, but she had beautiful arms, and beautiful teeth, both of which stood out especially, as well as blue eyes and shoulder length black hair which had, or which she had given, the aspect of being animated. She had no use for me at all, but how could she? I have no personality, have nothing to say that will interest them, to 999 out of every 1,000 women I encounter.

I could look at pictures of Meredith Salenger, if not quite all day, for a while. I had forgotten about her. Probably this was for the best.

Meredith Salenger Today.

And Another One. Hey, Why Not?

To Die in Madrid (1963)

This could go on the list of supposedly great movies that are not readily available in this country. I did watch it on the internet, however I could not find any uploads (?) of it with English subtitles. It is in French, and while I can understand more French than I can any other language, I don't understand it well enough to really follow the narration in its finer points. The movie is a documentary about the Spanish Civil War. Whether all of the footage was historical or if there were some parts (the non-battle, non-mass crowds under wartime condition parts obviously), mainly of traditional or pastoral settings, that were filmed contemporaneously by the (a?) director. The Spanish Civil War of course has always spoken to intellectuals and artists. Apart from the most superficial facts and analyses of it I don't know very much about it, as least not what inspires such deep responses to it by astute and gifted people; though perhaps it is nothing more than the sense of the unique and antiquated beauty of the Spanish country and culture that seems viscerally to contain a depth and nobility that is inaccessible to people living in modern societies. I don't know how much this movie would have taught me, as I got the impression from the narrator's tone of voice, what I could make out of the French, and the types of footage that were emphasized, that the filmmakers were of the strident, highly indignant school and that the view of the war that they were pressing, while it might have explained a great deal, might also have explained nothing useful to me. Nonetheless, the film was strong on this antiquated Spanish beauty and atmosphere--is it a lie, or a distraction from facing very unpleasant facts about a culture (or the several cultures who co-exist to however much of an extent in the territory known as Spain) and the people who make it up? I don't think so, simply because the atmosphere is so seductive and is the main reason many people care so much about the war that took place there in the 1930s. I have very much wanted to go to Spain over the last couple of years, as if doing so would clear my head and restore my lost equilibrium in some way, as if all of the elements that I am missing and which are essential to living a fully human life, or at least a Western idea of a human life, could still be found there.  

Witness For the Prosecution (1957)

As I have noted often, courtroom movies are not the kind of thing I usually get excited about. I was a little more open to seeing this one than the run of pictures of this type, because it was directed by Billy Wilder and had Charles Laughton as one of its stars. Wilder is probably in the top five of my all time favorite directors at this point, and while I have not seen a lot of Charles Laughton, I already have the idea that he always delivers. And Laughton does deliver here. He is great, the movie is worth watching for him alone. It is not that Billy Wilder doesn't deliver--the movie is eminently watchable, and makes for good entertainment--it does not exactly feel like a Billy Wilder movie however. This is probably because it is based on an Agatha Christie story and is set in the Inns of Court in London. I have never read any Agatha Christie, but this is the 2nd movie (And Then There Were None was the other) based on one of her stories that I have seen; evidently her trademark was the multiple twist ending. These are clever, but they are not, at this stage of my development, what I am going to remember, or even be particularly interested in, about either of these films. Among the other stars in this movie worth noting are Marlene Dietrich, whom I had never seen before, and who I thought had retired after the 30s. She is about 55 in this and looks quite remarkable. Combined with her German attitude this is at times a genuinely scary combination. Elsa Lanchester, a great beauty in the 30s (Rembrandt) and the wife of Charles Laughton, looks more her age, which is the same as Marlene Dietrich's, in a deliberately somewhat dowdy role here, though it is still evident that she had been a beautiful young woman. Charles Laughton himself was always one of those jowly, enormous-headed, highly competent and well-trained, brandy-drinking, decidedly non-metrosexual British men of the Brideshead generation (what happened to this stock?). Tyrone Power, an American who was a fairly big star for a brief period in the 50s (he died of a heart attack at age 44 the year after this came out) was in this as well. I haven't seen him before; he wasn't very impressive--or at least he seems out of place--when contrasted against all of the other talent here.*

I would give this movie 3 1/2 stars out of five, maybe push it to four on the basis of Laughton's performance alone. Otherwise my prejudice against courtroom movies is too much to overcome for me to truly love it, and the cleverness of the twists at the end after being led so diligently for the better part of two hours to another specific and pat conclusion does not provide enough satisfaction. It is much better to have a sense of myriad possibilities for an ending and anticipate which direction the story will end up taking than to be persuaded throughout that the story and the characters are of such and such a type, only to have the switch at the end that tells you, no, no, it is all completely the opposite of what the entirety of our previous storytelling would have permitted you to believe, which latter I obviously do not like as a technique.

*I have since discovered that Tyrone Power was actually quite a big star in the 1930s and 40s. However he must be largely forgotten today, as I had scarcely heard of him and had never seen him in a movie until this.

More Pocket Movie Reviews

I'm going to go through these so fast you won't believe it.

Everlasting Moments (2009)

Swedish movie about a woman trapped in a difficult marriage who finds some kind of release through taking photographs. I actually liked it, though that has to be taken by the reader with a few caveats as regards my personal proclivities. 1. It is set during the 1910s. 2. It takes place in Sweden, and is all about Swedish people (and one Danish guy), whom besides being attractive I also relate to relatively easily as far as temperament, gloominess, the nature of the climate they have to live in, level of intellectual energy, etc. 3. The director was Jan Troell, who has been directing films since the mid-1960s and was 78 when he did this. In other words, he is working in a paradigm that is familiar. This movie reminds me of something that would have come out around 1987.

I am glad to see they are still making feature films in the Swedish language, especially given that country's outsized tradition in that art. I had thought maybe with global economics and the defection of all top international talent to the identifiable centers of economic dynamism in their respective fields, that the worldwide market for movies in Swedish centering around, if not small, then relatively subdued themes, would no longer justify the expense not only of making them but of developing the talent to make them. Of course Jan Troell is old and has international prestige, so he may be a dinosaur who has the cache to carry on. He also went to Hollywood for a few years back in the 70s, though it sounds like he didn't like the dynamics of how he was allowed to work there and came home pretty quickly.

This was another Roger Ebert pick, though in this instance I think a good one (I identify the Roger Ebert selections because he is a much more generous critic than the other books I have, which rated this movie for example as low as 2 1/2 stars).

ER: Series Premiere (1995)

This was actually very good. It is the first episode of the long-running TV show, which I have otherwise never seen. I am guessing it was a two hour program, cut down without the commercials to about a ninety minute movie. Maybe because I have worked in a hospital for sixteen years I find medical movies more inherently interesting at this point than courtroom or police movies, but the way they did this was effective, it gave a sense of an environment that is, like it or not, at the very center of human activity in contemporary life.

Yes, I did like the no-fool-suffering, first in her class, relentlessly professional and oh so cute lady doctor.

Poltergeist (1983)

The first of two blockbusters from my childhood I was certainly well aware of but had never seen before. Poltergeist seems to me quite dated. The animating spirit behind it does not resonate with me, and probably would not have at the time either, though it does seem that the public was more easily frightened by movies in those days than any sensible person would be now. A few of the forgotten early 80s artifacts were interesting to see, such as those horrible shag rugs everybody had that always smelled bad because of the dogs. My parents were the kind of cleanliness fanatics who even in 1983 didn't allow people to smoke or bring dogs into the house--other people regarded them as strange--so I always thought everybody else's house that we went to smelled awful, though only of their generation. The houses of people my grandparents' age I always thought were great, even though they smoked just as much as everyone else did. Maybe the smoke mixed better with the older rugs and tables. I had also forgotten how the television stations would just go off the air at one or two in the morning and there would be static for 4 or 5 hours overnight. That must have ended almost right after this movie was made though because by '87 or '88 when I was at the end of high school and staying up late all the time there were reruns or movies or infomercials and the like going on all night.

I also like how when their daughter is zapped into another dimension that the family doesn't go to the police or seek out credentialed experts in radio waves or black holes or whatever but call on exorcists and spiritual mediums to deal with their problem.  

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

As I've mentioned before I never saw the Star Wars movies as a kid, even though I was right in the primo age group to have become enveloped in the cult, and I find as an adult I really cannot get into them at all. On of my movie books has rated all six of the Star Wars movies, including the 3 new ones that everybody hated, at 5 stars. Well, one down at least.

I was ten when this came out, and even though I never had a great clamoring to see this, or any other movie, at that time, it is kind of surprising to me that I was not at some point taken to see it anyway, only because it was such a huge deal. I know my father thought they were stupid, but his opinion on anything did not seem to carry much weight with anyone besides me. Anyway, I am inclined to agree with him now.

I did enjoy seeing Billy Dee Williams, whose appearance brought some much needed interest, or humor, or even implied humor, to the movie (though I kept waiting for him to crack open a Colt 45).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Famously dominated the Oscars in its year, as time goes on a fairly legendary one in the annals of film. The other best picture nominees that year were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville. The other best director nominees were Fellini, Kubrick, Altman, and Lumet. This of course was directed by Milos Forman, probably the most famous figure to emerge from the Czech new wave of the 60s who emigrated from that country after the crackdown of 1968. I have to admit, I have a lot of affection for this movie. It is absurd, but that is after all, largely the point. The sensibility of life as essentially absurd is a strong current running throughout the Czech mindset, which impresses itself upon the outside observer as bitterness tempered or cut through in places with a rather charming whimsy. This is the best I can explain the quality with which I think Milos Forman infused into this movie, which I'm sure would have been very different, and probably less likable, in the hands of another director. Also, I like to think that maybe I share something of this outlook on life, though it has not assumed as clear and definite or appealing a form in me as maybe it has in intelligent Czech people.

I am tempted to get some of the music Nurse Ratched was fond of playing in the ward (such as the number above) to put on for my children. It is actually quite calming, and while I am worried about them turning into passive zombies wholly lacking in any initiative like I am, I think there are much greater threats in that way than elevator music, which naturally would be interspersed with strident, commanding selections from Beethoven and the like.   

Everyone who sees this now makes the same observation, but it is remarkable to think that this was a major Hollywood production and was very popular commercially. Or was considered popular enough.

Little Big Man (1970)

I'm not sure what to make of this movie, which I knew nothing about before it turned up on my list. I will probably need to see it again sometime. At some moments I felt like it was interesting, at others I wondered if it were one of those 'you had to be there' late 60s/early 70s movies (I stole this description, which I found humorous, from a prominent and outstanding movie blogger who seems to be about my age). I had trouble concentrating my attention on it all the way through. It is a long, sprawling, picaresque Western-type of movie, similar to a type of novel that was popular at the time, massive, detail and fact-stuffed, full of goofy and somewhat irreverent incidents often featuring historical personages, the John Barth, John Gardner type of book. The director was Arthur Penn, who had done Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant in the three years prior to this, so he was at the short-lived, but quite productive, peak of his career. Dustin Hoffman was the star, playing a rather strange role as a white man who, starting as a child, keeps getting captured during the wars between the white men and the Indians and living as a member of whichever society he happens to be in the fold of at the time until he gets captures again in the next war. Faye Dunaway is also in it, playing an even more bizarre character. It's 1970, so Dustin Hoffman has a decent amount of situationally interesting sex come his way even though he is neither particularly looking for it nor seems to merit such unasked for bounty. George Custer is a fairly major character, and a good one. Wild Bill Hickok is almost depicted, though he is not as effective as the Custer character. I think I will give it a year of two and see it again.

A Beautiful Chicago Mind

In which I briefly take on the back-to-back best picture Oscar winners from 2001-2002:

Chicago

It didn't appeal to me. Raunchy 1970s musicals are not my thing, though they have always been popular with some part of the public. Even at the time I felt this element of the popular culture of my early childhood to be mostly grotesque. This movie was made in 2002, so everything is flashier and more antiseptic than it would have been in the actual '70s, but the grating songs and attitude of the original show have carried over annoyingly enough.

It is strange, cold, loud, and jarring, and has an odd and very flat cast. None of the characters has any appeal or reality. There was a lot of emphasis in the special features on the prodigious amount of work that was put in by all of the talent involved, but so what? This is one of the more annoying trends of contemporary life, the self-congratulation and calling attention to how many grueling hours one is putting into one's craft; even if something worthwhile has been achieved, it either strikes one forcibly on the screen (as in some of the Werner Herzog movies) or in whatever its equivalent is in other fields of endeavor, or it fails to pique interest. I have spent probably four or five hours straining to write this post. I don't want it to appear that way, but if it does, it is an effect of my style or construction. I don't think it should be a point of emphasis in publicity though.

Hollywood loves this story--this is the 3rd or 4th version of it they have made, including 1942's Roxie Hart, which I noted having seen here a couple of years back. Nothing in either the premise or the execution ever seems to fire my imagination with regard to it.

All of the main female leads are within a year of my exact age, which exercises in numerology always interest me. Renee Zellweger was born 8 months before me in Texas; Catherine Zeta-Jones 3 months prior in Wales; and Queen Latifah (nee Dana Owens) was born two months after in Newark, New Jersey. None of them strike me as having much commonality of experience or worldview or culture with me, even at the most superficial levels. The Queen probably would be the closest of the three, both due to geographical and socio-economic proximity (her parents were a public school teacher and a cop, which is about the same level of society that I come from). The other two I have no read on at all. Emerson says of the artist, that she "...should pierce the soul; should command; should not sit aloof & circumambient merely, but should come & take me by the hand & lead me somewhither..." This is not what I experience when I see Renee Zellweger.

A Beautiful Mind

This I liked, naturally. Who doesn't like movies set in the Princeton and MIT math departments in the 1940s and 50s? I'd like to know, and then have something done about it. This was one of the last films I ever saw in the theater, the night before my wife went into labor with our first baby. I enjoyed it well enough at that time too. I cannot put myself on a limb and say it is Great, because what I liked about it was the nostalgia and the evocation of high-intellect environments as I like to imagine they are, and in this it felt like the movie was flattering me rather than dealing with its own more interesting or serious subject and saying to the likes of me, "Try and figure out what it is actually about; though you can't", which would have been a lot better. When I saw it in 2002 I identified more readily with the genius mathematicians and Ivy Leaguers and Nobel Prize Winners. I confidently thought this was my natural crowd, more or less. Now of course I recognize that world and experience of life as it really is, hopelessly remote.

As long as we are on the theme of women who were born in 1969-70, we should talk about Jennifer Connelly. I will get the juvenile stuff out of the way first. Back around 1988 Jennifer Connelly--at that time her name was frequently preceded by the modifier 'pneumatic' in the press--starred in a movie called Some Girls, in which a typical schmoe college student, who somehow happens to be going out with her, or thinks he is, comes to stay with (and get worked over by) her artistic, rich, beautiful and sexually sophisticated family at their chateau in Quebec over Christmas break. I watched this at about 2 in the morning at the home of a friend of mine after an evening of revelry. This friend was a man who could juggle 3 women at a time and keep their energies turned to hating their rivals and figuring out how to eliminate them rather than directing any anger towards him. You are probably wondering why, if he was so cool, he was hanging out with with me at all, let alone watching movies with me on cable TV at 2 in the morning. It's a good question. For whatever reason, this guy found me amusing. Also, he usually took care of his seductions quite early in the evening, especially if one of his reliables showed up. He would excuse himself for a minute to go and banter with the newly arrived guest, all very casual and deliberate, though it did not take long for him to absorb the attention of his target and force whatever other people were present to wander off. He would then manage to maneuver the girl into a private room under some pretense and within 20 minutes the job would be done. We would then see the girl running out of the house in tears at having yet again succumbed so easily, and a couple of minutes afterwards our friend would rejoin us by the bar in a state of feigned agitation, as if he were angry at himself (or even us) for his own weakness. But in reality, the tension was off (for him), and he was freed up to revel with his male friends for the rest of the night. But back to Jennifer Connelly, at the conclusion of Some Girls, much of which involves the actress in question running around in a black bra tormenting the supposed boyfriend, with no intention of giving up the goods, my friend the stud turned and said, "Surrender, I think I am traumatized for life". If that was his reaction, you can only imagine what mine must have been.

Jennifer Connelly was born in the Catskills and grew up partly in Brooklyn Heights and partly in Woodstock, New York. She attended arts schools. Her father was Northern European Catholic (Irish-Norwegian) and her mother was Jewish, a combination I have frequently noticed to have produced dynamic results. Her parents appear to have been affluent, though not plutocrats. She attended Yale for a couple of years--if I had gone there I would have been in her class--and then transferred to Stanford for a while, but she returned to films before getting any degrees. All of this obviously makes her progressive/educated upper middle class East Coast to her core. She is definitely representative of a type in my generation that I was always trying hard to like because, in the first place, if you have any identification with this artsy-liberal-semi-intellectual east coast crowd, there are not very many alternatives, and secondly, because these women had the kinds of attitudes and personalities that were, for lack of a better word, 'approved', by whoever it was that determined what the women our age ought to be like, and what we ought to look for in them. The problem of course was that while these women were adequate, indeed more than adequate, a quantitative improvement in outlook and ambition and educational achievement over prior generations, too many males were not, and this mismatch of qualities and excellences between boys and girls drained much of the fun out of social life in that era. Jennifer Connelly is both an extreme example of this, and a walking bundle of contradictions. Her entire bearing in interviews and so forth, especially now (at late as 1995 she was still coming off as more a flakey-artsy rather than serious-professional artsy, which transformation she underwent sometime between the above date and 2001) speaks of someone who came of age socially in an environment with a critical dearth of adequately developed men compared to herself. Yet at the same time that she makes statements such as not respecting women who use flirtatious behavior to catch the attention of  males and get something that they want, the bulk of the roles in her career have been as a girlfriend/ supportive wife or unabashed object of not particularly sophisticated lust. Though perhaps I am seeing the wrong movies...

Contemporary Bonus

Over the course of the summer, I had the opportunity to spend time with people outside my immediate family. Sometimes movies were watched. These gatherings were largely made up of people who not do not want to watch Celine and Julie Go Boating, ever, so I happened to see a couple of fairly recent films that I wanted to briefly comment on, Cedar Rapids and Crazy Stupid Love. These were both middling to occasionally amusing Hollywood product. They shared several common themes with other recent run of the mill movies I had seen, which, as I rarely watch up to date movies, indicated to me that these similarities must represent real trends. I have already labored too long on this post, so I will simply list what I think these trends are, and perhaps I will elaborate at a later time:

1. The earnest and totally naive 30-something male character from the upper midwest. Characteristics: goofy, usually a virgin, wholly unironic, has little knowledge of the world beyond the 30 mile radius around his hometown in northern Minnesota. Basically a modern-day version of Dostoevsky's Idiot, only completely infantile and holly devoid of spiritual depth. Variations appear in: Lars & the Real Girl, Cedar Rapids. Fargo. What is the cause for the proliferation of this type? Fatigue with the cynicism of modern society, though I believe having the characters be male is a cipher for film producers' real desire, which is for the possibility/return of sweetness & innocence in women. They dare not express that openly though.

2. The Business Conference set at a hotel as a place for respectable middle class adults to be free to engage in wild behavior. Variations appear in Cedar Rapids, Up in the Air. What is the cause of this? Respectable middle aged Americans are so bored and desperate to have fun while at the same time avenues in which this is even a plausible fantasy are becoming more and more restricted. The fact that the Business Conference seems to be emerging as an adult fantasy where people imagine they might be able to meet and get away with having sex with a stranger is all you need to know about the kind of desperation that is afoot in the land. See point #5 also, which is related.

3. The group of unrelated, single professional friends who have often just met coming together to rescue/ intervene on behalf of a member of the group in trouble. Variations appear in: about 5,000 movies, though I date the trend as a grand theme of modern popular cinema to Four Weddings and a Funeral. This obviously speaks to the desperation of people, especially single urban professional people, for the camaraderie that is lacking from their lives.

4. The part of the player in Crazy Stupid Love appears to have been both shamelessly cribbed in whole from the game/pick up artist bloggers such as Roissy in D.C, and intended as satire. It didn't work as satire.

5. Sexual desperation of middle class 40-somethings. Yes, this is a constant theme of world history. Still, in Crazy Stupid Love, the main character's wife announces she wants to separate from him for a while, during which time he meets the player, who teaches him how to dress and talk to women, has one night stands with 8 attractive younger women he picks up in bars, makes his kids' teenage babysitter fall in love with him and take naked pictures of herself to send to him, before finally getting back with his wife at the end. The writers of this movie obviously realized that their fantasies and internet reading pretty much constituted the entirety of their mental activity at this point, so why not combine them and make a movie out of it?

6. The other notable things about these movies is how little there is at stake in them, because everyone is so atomized. It doesn't matter if Steve Carell gets back with his wife or what happens to his children other than to himself. In films such as The Best Years of Our Lives or It's a Wonderful Life the future of the whole society is seen to hinge on people's marital choices and their ability to cope with changes in society and so on. I suspect this is one of the reasons why so many modern movies, especially those aimed at mainstream audience, seem so thin and pointless. But I really have to go, and can't elaborate on this any more...

Movies! (1986-92)

The combination of summer and a gauntlet of mostly not very enticing 80s and 90s movies forming the top of my to-see list has made for a slow couple of months in this regard. I will try to dispatch of these quickly.

Afterburn (1992)

This is another TV movie from the 80s and 90s that was absurdly given a five-star rating in one of the otherwise fairly reliable guidebooks. It is about an Air Force pilot who is killed while flying a faulty plane, the ensuing cover-up and insistence of the military authorities that the crash was caused by pilot error, and the determination of his fiery widow to discover and force those authorities to acknowledge the truth and clear her husband's name, in which effort she partly succeeded. Well done for what it is, I suppose, but not my kind of thing. Perhaps it should be more my kind of thing, as the film is all about tough, decisive, purposeful, highly competent people--in addition to elite flyers and the military high command and tenacious, fearless women, there are also big time lawyers whose main concern in taking on clients is that these may not have the stomach for the ruthless tactics the lawyer will need to employ to successfully prosecute their case. However, I found it rather flat, the characters probably too realistically depicted. Nothing sparkled. I did consider that perhaps the story was just too grown-up for me, but it also was not meaningfully artistic enough to hold my interest even if it this had been the case.

Distant Voices/Still Lives (1988)

This is one of the most unique and affecting movies I have ever seen. I can say this with the more confidence because I have not seen very many genuinely unique and affecting movies. I may not be able to adequately explain what I mean by this, nor do I have to, given the endless reams of movie commentary, adequate or otherwise, that already exists, but I am going to try, lest my capacity to use language atrophy entirely.

The basic way I would describe this film is as a sincere, unpretentious, uncondescending, sad poem, highly artistic and stylized, centered around settings and people that would be understood in almost all conventional art-language as dismal, ugly and uninteresting. in which something resembling the fleeting essence of ordinary human existence is dug for and to a remarkable degree depicted. This material could easily have been used in the service of a more 'raw' or angry film, but Terence Davies, the outstanding director, always counterbalances even his darkest scenes with a strong suggestion (or reminder) that this essence of experience, especially the moments of personal agency and camaraderie, is just as real and important and must be acknowledged as much. This is difficult, I would think, to express believably, and appreciate the strength of the effort he has made to do so.

The tone and balance throughout this movie with regard to affection towards the characters, objectivity, honesty, the use of singing as a major point of emphasis and character, all wholly untainted by a hint of pretentiousness, is classically well-managed. .

Below is a few minutes from what I believe is Terence Davies's most recent movie, a documentary/memoir about Liverpool, with heavy emphasis on World War II and the austerity period, the same in which DV/SL is set. This guy is an incredible filmmaker, especially when you consider that he seems to be very sentimental, and that this sentimentality strongly informs his work. He has mastered not only his vision, but what his feelings are about that vision, which he reproduces in his films in a way that makes them seem more substantial than such impressions usually attain. I suppose he is regarded in England as a conservative of sorts because he believes the country has gone to the dogs since his childhood and this sense is certainly an underlying, if not especially subtle, theme of his movies. I admit I am inclined to agree him on this point.

Don Quixote (1988)

This is a filmed performance of the famous Kirov Ballet of Leningrad. As I know nothing about ballet, I had a hard time both following what was going on and being overly thrilled by the art, though the sets looked lovely, and the dancers talented, skilled and artistically serious. I thought a lot about how glorious it must be to possess a brain truly steeped in the secrets and salient truths of European high culture. I have read the book of Don Quixote three or four times, and while there is a highly skilled dancer dressed as Don Quixote (and one as Sancho Panza too) who wanders on and off the stage as various points of the show, and the set for the second act includes a giant windmill, there are also long sequences involving gypsies and a romance between a barber and an innkeeper's daughter (I had to look this up) that seem to have to been based on minor incidents in the book that I don't remember. Apparently most of the plot of the ballet related to the book of Don Quixote is taken from two chapters. It is really about the dancers, of course.

My modest researches into this have also reminded me that of all the realms of snobbery which the arts have provided us, there are no snobs like ballet snobs. You would think that hardcore ballet fans were a pretty small group that is generally left alone to love their diva ballerinas, but they have a lot of disappointment and disdain to get off their chests.

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

I remember how popular this baby was among all the yuppie baby boomers when it first came out, and accordingly made a point of always staying as far away from it as possible. But the fates, which I believe to be real, were obviously for some reason determined that I should see this movie before the vagaries of my system should bring up Tokyo Story, or Vertigo, or The Searchers, or five hundred other deathless masterpieces, because when I devise a system I follow it to the death. Going off the course, except in carefully arranged cases, destroys the continuity and leads nowhere.

I should note that there are several things I enjoyed about this movie. While I was watching I thought it might have been made in Maine, because it looked a lot like it--I didn't recognize the town they filmed in, so I thought it might be the Bar Harbor area or somewhere even farther north. As it turned out it was filmed in bordering New Brunswick, which I have never been to, but which looks to be more Maine than Maine itself. The scenery reminded me of my youth, as did the time, which actually was my youth. The school reminded me of my school. The parts where they are playing football on a field covered with cold puddles and wet brown leaves? that's pretty much my adolescence in a nutshell. So I liked that.

The other part I liked was the restaurant the lead characters went to on their first date. There was a jolt back to the 80s. It was just a regular Italian restaurant, with a bar and a small place for dancing, and I think a pianist. I remember going to places like that vividly, though I haven't seen one for years now. Obviously the combination of chain restaurants and the steady demise of the middle class has killed them. What regular place employs a pianist anymore, even as a second job? Yet lots of places used to have one. So that made me very nostalgic.

But that is all I am conceding. This thing is a compendium of annoying early baby boomer tropes. The author of the original play, Mark Medoff, was born in 1940, so he predates the hard core of this cohort, and I don't know how much the spirit of the original play was altered for the film. But the director, Randa Haines (the first female director nominated for a best picture Oscar, incidentally), was born in 1945, and William Hurt, the leading man, was born in 1950, so I am giving the credit for the film's dominant spirit to them. The other lead, Marlee Matlin, somewhat well known as the deaf actress who won an Oscar, was born in 1965, which makes her a generation-Xer. So I guess she's all right.

The first annoying current running through this movie is William Hurt's smug face, which is the same smug face my father and all his friends had. I can't bring myself to want to punch out my father, but I would like to rain some pain down on William Hurt. These people have all gone through their whole lives thinking they're God's gift to the planet, and for what? The circumstances, the time they were born into, the lives they were able to lead, encouraged this. I will admit it, I really can't stand them. Having to endure this movie served as a good reminder of why.

All right, on a lighter note, we have a classic rendition of the young baby boomer job interview. Job interviews evidently used to be a lot less stressful in the old days, when you didn't have to try to persuade the person grilling you that you were the most qualified person on the planet for the position you were seeking. No, even if you were rather insouciant and blase in your interview you could still often count on being offered the position, with its full health insurance, and its pension, only with the caveat that the organization into which you were being hired had an established culture and ways of doing things, and that hires were expected to conform to the rules. What is this, the 50s? Telling a new employee in a baby boomer movie he's expected to follow procedure is the cinematic equivalent of Chekhov's ax; you know there won't be a rule left standing by the end of the movie. Which sort of segues into the next theme:

This one is such a cherished baby boomer belief that you still see it surface occasionally, though I am pretty sure its effectiveness as an educational resource has been thoroughly disproved. Of course I am talking about the idea that the insertion of rock and roll, especially from the 1960s, into the school curriculum, will foster a veritable explosion of learning. Given that in this movie the school in question is a school for the deaf (though I guess they can feel the vibrations through the floor if you crank the bass loud enough), the circumstance that  even here the rock-based program is the key to turning the moribund school around, should demonstrate just   how thorough (and perverse) the grip that this idea had on the generation of the 60s was. To me--and I mostly like this music too--and I believe most people my age, the thought that this genre of art has any substantial academic value is I think mostly ludicrous, yet it turns up in movie after movie after movie with a boomer mentality.

I should add that the boomers were still in their sexy years when this came out, so the relationship between William Hurt and Marlee Matlin gets physical pretty abruptly and matter of factly--this matter is addressed first, and any questions where things go from there can be addressed later. This is one area where I sort of grudgingly admire the baby boomers. Everybody who has come after them seems to have been hung up on determining who is worthy of sex and the appropriate expression of sexual desires (exceptions made for the obviously superior of course), before allowing that side of human interaction to develop. The boomers seemed to accept that everybody was motivated by this and was always going to act accordingly. I don't know that their approach is necessarily healthy either, but I will grant them that they don't seem to have pussyfooted their lives away in panting and not getting as so many people seem to do now.

Women Show More Cleavage Today Than They Did 20 Years Ago (Though They Supposedly Have Less Sex)

It's Garbage time in the last game of this blog's life. We are trailing by 50. The other team has long pulled its best players and is laying back (I think it probably should be lying, but no one who uses the expression ever says lying) on defense; however we are still throwing up wild three pointers that land nowhere near the basket and off-balance running one handers from outside the lane, as even with the minimal resistance we are unable to penetrate therein. I admit I am surprised by how grisly it has been. I thought we'd be competitive in most of our games and easily make the tournament. 12-6 at the worst, never 4-14 with most of the defeats by blowout. We overrated our talent, it goes without saying, but we also never identified anything we did well, or that might develop into something we did well by the standards of our competition over the course of the season if we worked at it. This all falls on the coach, of course, and in real life would necessitate his firing (to mix sports, if I am the Gerry Faust of this blog, this post is pretty much the 58-7 Miami game).

A few months back I remember articles making the rounds about how certain aspects of the culture--namely fashion, music, movies--had stopped progressing around 1992, and that while there were easily identifiable differences from 1932 to 1952 to 1972 to 1992 in these areas, there was, in the eyes of these writers, little discernible different from 1992 to 2012 (literature may have been included in the list, though people have been complaining about its being moribund since long before 1992). My initial reaction upon reading these was to think that superficially it seems to be somewhat true, but that is of course because I am stuck in many ways, and always will be, in a 1990s (and 80s)-centric idea of how the world is. Time really has moved on, and while most people I know do still dress about the same as they did in the early 90s, all you have to do is search for "shopping mall photos circa 1990" or some similar thing to see that in fact young people do dress (and look) quite differently. The main change in fashion, other than that there are a lot more really fat people, and a lot of them don't seem to be as conscious of themselves as being grotesque as they probably would have 20 years ago, is the ubiquity of tattoos, which for the most part only hardcore heavy metal fans and a few extra-bad boys and girls who backed up the look with a lot of real attitude and debauchery had in those days. I am certain that the young women show a lot more cleavage than they were doing in the late 80s and early 90s, and you would think if anybody would know about this it would be me. I also see girls wearing bikinis on the beach, even some who have less than spectacular figures. I don't remember anybody 'normal' (i.e., was not clearly dating a bodybuilder or member of a biker gang) wearing a bikini in New England at least in the 80s. In general I think people look more and more stupid the more years that go by, and project less in the way of having any kind of interesting personality, but that is also a common affliction of aging.

Again, there does not seem to be much going on in music--I seem to hear about two new songs a year that I actually like at all at maximum--but it is highly likely that if there is any new music that is going to be considered good fifty years from now I am not hearing it, and even if I were technically hearing it, like the old fogies who doubtless heard classic rock songs in the 50s and 60s and could not discerning any pleasant sounds in them at all, I would probably not be 'hearing' what is dynamic in them. New movies and literature, the other dominant artistic forms of Generation X's and especially the Baby Boomers' most impressionable years, are not giving the most emotionally devoted, or at least most critically credentialed, segments of their audiences what they are looking for either, and I must include myself among that disgruntled middle aged group, since I find it pretty much impossible to find anything new comparable to the good old stuff before everybody became stifled by the particular attitudes and variety of self-consciousness that you know everything today is smothered in before you even see it. Still, a half-century on, there will be aficiondos of our period who will think a few things from it splendid, and wonder and be saddened that there are not, and never will be, any more works of a similar character to be discovered from it. Our generation, if not dead, will be superannuated, its essential work finished (if you think, as I increasingly do, that most artists decline after age 40 my generation's work is already essentially finished) and our descendants will have from what was done a strong sense of all that was not done, and might have been done. But they will love some of the things that were done for reasons that are inaccessible to someone already past middle age now and making a living or maintaining a persona as a curmudgeon and a scold.

I do suspect that the new technology of the last 20 years may be hindering people who may have been creative in these older forms. I am not referring to myself, as when I used to attempt creative writing I wrote all my drafts out in longhand and typed and printed up copies from which I did revisions after that. I found I could not compose on the computer, that it was too fast, that I didn't have the same sense of making the actual thing that I wanted to make. I do compose the blog posts on the computer of course, because I don't have time to write them out in longhand at present, but I am always a little jittery and uncomfortable in doing so, I am always conscious of time, I am always conscious of other points I could bring in which would necessitate changing the flow of the narrative, and it shows in the postings. I think the ever-increasing stupendous-ness of the technology is probably a little deflating to would-be artists who are trying to, or need to use it, but have no sense of control over it because they don't really understand how it works. Personally I would happily give up computers long before I gave up old-style literature or music or films, and I do not think that computers are an expression of a superior intelligence to at least the greatest works of art, but it is an expression of a very powerful and seemingly very different kind of intelligence that is wholly ascendant at present. The humanistic artist of the present and future probably has to, a la Buster Keaton with the movie camera, or even better, Vermeer and the other ancient artists' necessity of making their own actual paint and other supplies from scratch, take the computer apart (not necessarily literally, though that would probably not hurt), identify what its powers and ruling premises really are and what they really signify to man in his current state of existence, and then internalize that understanding so that it is as much as possible second nature, and the technology is no longer a hindrance. Doubtless this process is already underway, but I probably will never be able to get it. I'm kind of intellectually stranded in my early 40s, and I don't like it.

Back to the main point, however. The  physical manifestations and delivery of art even in my childhood were, though by machines and technology, were by machines and technology that one had a reasonable visual and cognitive sense of how they worked--printing presses, records, film reels, radio broadcasts. I have no sense of how clicking various buttons on the internet allow me not only to save my draft of this post, but in the event that I should fly to Irkutsk in the next couple of days, to be able to retrieve it there on any computer I might find that has internet access. I have no sense of how if I click a couple of buttons, that I not  only can hear and see video images of Tavares' "Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel", but I can have a copy of it "burned" onto my own computer and can then do I guess any number of things with it, though so far I still just make CDs out of these songs I download or upload, though how that process works I don't really understand either. The worst part is, I'm not terribly interested in understanding it, even if I could; but that is in some large sense the key to what life is in my time, regardless of whether I want it to be or not, and I should be interested in it. But back again to the main point--the computer is too powerful a tool. If you attempt to use it passively as just a cleaner and faster substitute for the kind of work you were used to doing in a way in which you had greater hands-on physical control, you will be surprised by how much power it saps out of you because it makes you aware, subconsciously or not, that there is infinitely more going on in it than there is in you.

I wanted to write some more about the negativity so many people feel about college these days, and how I do expect this widespread disenchantment to be a serious political catalyst within the next few years, and not only because of the loan debt, though that is certainly a big part of it. For a large part of the current generation especially there has been, a deep emotional investment in the whole college process from an early age, and despite the cynical exhortations and words of wisdom of their elders to toughen up, that nothing is promised or owed to anyone in this world, that they didn't study the right subjects or compete strongly enough to be successful and now they just have to live with the consequences of that failure, I don't think they are going to be so easily persuaded that it didn't really signify anything as far as the rest of life goes. But I'll have to go into that more another time. That, and I suppose other politics. Someday I'll probably break down and relate my vision of a world where published authors and professors and other intellectual authorities have attained the power of administering life and death over people who unsuccessfully aspire to join their ranks, and of my own trial and execution at the hands of this court--but yes, I should definitely stop for tonight...

Songs: The (Mildly) Testosterone Informed Edition

I had forgotten about this for many years. Great video.

Back in 1985, we still thought it was our birthright to have a girlfriend who was not only physically perfect, but extraordinarily friendly and kind as well (The Karate Kid, which I believe came out in the same year, also mined this vein, as did doubtless numerous other examples which I cannot at the moment recall). So this video did not strike a great part of the viewing public as ridiculous or a cruel lie as one might expect, but as the way teenage life properly ought to turn out if you were not incredibly unlucky. I was fifteen in '85. I recall it as a pretty positive time. I was in the end of my freshman year and beginning of my sophomore year in high school, and it was one of the three or four brief windows of time I have had in my life where I can actually say some development occurred. That was the year I first started to read a lot of old literature, or at least 19th century novels, and at the time it seemed to have a significant effect on my mind, enough that the idea that if I were a kid today I would probably be too immersed in trying to make friends on the internet to bother with reading those books disturbs me a little. I also gained about 20 pounds, which only brought me from 145 to around 165, so it's still not like I was terrorizing people at the beach, but things seemed to heading in the right direction (after this unfortunately I didn't gain any more weight at all until about the mid-90s). I also even improved enough in basketball that the other guys on the team allowed me (tentatively) to give them an occasional nod acknowledging social connection when I would pass them, often while they were engaged in talking up some chicks, in the hallway or cafeteria. Unfortunately all this progression came to a sudden halt around the middle of my sophomore year, and improved very little, and correspondingly got very little out of, my remaining years in high school. Even my reading tailed off considerably, and the initial intensity and rush of fulfillment that I had felt during the fall and winter of '85 burned themselves out, though they would at least reappear in a couple of periods of similar duration, one during college up to about the middle of my junior year, at which point I was evidently sated for the time being and ceased to progress any further in that environment, and then one last for about 18 months in '96 and '97 during most of which time I was in Prague. Since then, however, I have not had any similar burst of consciousness of any expansion of my mental powers. I have kind of resigned myself to the idea that it probably will not happen again.

There are legions of people in the world who are adamant that the Rolling Stones are the greatest rock group in the history of the world, and will not truck any discussion to the contrary. I am not one of these advocates, as I only really like about seven or eight of their songs, all of which are among the famous ones (I don't think I can even name a Rolling Stones song that was not a massive hit). I also see, through this video research, that almost all of their best songs were released in the 2 or 3 year period at the very beginning of their careers, off of which brief space of time the group and its individual members have been living large for close to a half-century now. I don't begrudge them this, because they are very cool and these early songs really are amazing to think of in their moment, but I am surprised, and frequently am surprised in the case of artists, by how brief the window was in which their particular genius flourished. The much lamented Brian Jones, who has now been dead so long I don't think he can be referred to as "late" anymore, really hasn't missed a whole lot (apart from what he himself might have contributed), as far as major artistic achievements are concerned, by dying in 1967.

Another great song and video from farther back than I had realized. The atmosphere in this is so intense. The way the girls were just put into a trance back in the day by these rock groups is just incredible. I really think the display of these things on TV contributed to throwing the entire society out of whack. The average (beta or below) man, it suffices to say, in the days before television would have easily passed all the days of his life without having the slightest idea what women under the influence of intense hormonal excitement looked like, unless they happened to walk in on one in the act of being seduced by the great alpha male of both of their circumscribed world, though even in that case it would not have behooved Beta Man to study the scenario more closely given the physical proximity of a superior man. Once the young men of the television age began seeing footage of their female years swooning and having apparently lost all ability to control their presentation, naturally producing a proximate reaction in some such lady or group of ladies through their own exertions overwhelmed all other considerations, especially of a courteous and honorable nature.
All this acknowledged, it has been my experience that the most hardcore Rolling Stones fans have been overwhelmingly male, along with a few females of the type who were generally left unsupervised by any parental figure in high school and took full advantage of that freedom to make themselves the kind of girls that even bad boys hesitate to introduce to mother.

With regard to the comment threads on these videos, which reveal a lot of things that I find interesting, the commenters on the Stones videos are around 80-90% male, and heavily focused on how forkin' cool they are (which is absolutely true, if you're a generic white male, nothing looks cooler than Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, et al 1965-66) while Beatles videos, especially the early ones, even in 2012 are dominated by girls talking about how cute they are. "Nice" girls especially really do seem to uniformly prefer the Beatles, however awesomely cool the Stones are, and I think they are still the majority, albeit a shrinking one, of the women out there, especially in the serious dating and marriage market.

I don't think I had ever seen this. It's beautiful. Probably the most unabashedly and self-consciously 'English' video they ever made, and because it is them, it works perfectly.
    

I'm not sure why I am fascinated with this one. I'm in a mini phase where I'm suddenly interested in what was going on around '78-'82 in this particular niche of music, because there were a lot of very good, original, and natural sounding songs emanating from this wave, especially in England, but there some from America too, such as, I believe, the one below. By natural sounding I mean they don't sound forced or overly labored over, but as if they arose out of some urgent circumstance of life at the time which carried, or at least suggested, its own form with it already. The Elvis video I guess just reminds me of what a different world it was in the late 70s, especially in England. Old English music shows like Top of the Pops always give me the impression of being like a community television production, where these guys who are famous all over the world are somehow playing at the corner pub in front of a bunch of people who knew them at grammar school and cannot be in awe of them because they know the drummer's grandfather was a cabbie. It just isn't the same vibe I get from similar programs in this country.

This is a truly excellent song. This guy is from Detroit, though the song is very much in the British pop style, and as such has, for me at least, something of that intimate, non-bombastic feel that I like, but with rock music, especially after 1960 or so, mostly identify with British acts. I don't know why that style of music or songwriting is not more common in America (nowadays). I do often think that the consciousness of the "global" market or audience--maybe even the national one--has something to do with it. Hank Williams and Louis Armstrong, if they are not global icons (though they may be), are certainly famous nationally, but I suspect most of their good stuff was written with a very narrow demographic in mind. The same could be said for almost all of the 'Great Books", Shakespeare and certainly the Greeks, included. I really don't think most of our canonical authors were anticipating the day when Leo Strauss and his school would emerge to properly interpret their work. They wrote their works for the flesh and blood people they knew. Obviously in most instances--music perhaps especially--you do have to have a good audience that is going to be receptive to something that is interesting and new. But people who have not achieved a high degree of intimacy with the predilections of their prospective audience, whomever they anticipate that as being, are going to struggle to produce anything that is pleasing to anyone